S9E1 The Nuclear Frontier: When Maine Was the Frontline of the Cold War
In this episode, we interview Chris O’Brien on Maine’s strategic role as a nuclear frontier during the Cold War, highlighting how bases like Loring became central to national defense. We examine the legacy of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, balancing her famous stand against McCarthyism with her firm support for nuclear military readiness.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Chris O’Brien: At least a significant player in nuclear deterrence. And occasionally she was in favor of, perhaps more than deterrence.
[00:00:09] Eric Miller: Hello and welcome back to Maine Policy Matters, the official podcast of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine, where we discuss the policy matters that are most important to Maine’s people and why Maine policy matters at the local, state, and national levels.
[00:00:23] Eric Miller: My name is Eric Miller and I’ll be your host. Today’s episode is split into two segments. In the first we interview Chris O’Brien, director of the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, Maine, who provides historical context on this topic. In the second we interview Rebecca Gibbons, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Southern Maine, who discusses why Maine would be a strategically and politically amenable place for nuclear weapons placement, as well as the current state of affairs regarding nuclear weapons.
[00:00:56] Eric Miller: Dr. Chris O’Brien is the director of the Margaret Chase Smith Library. He has served as director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center in Dickinson, North Dakota, professor of History at the University of Maine at Farmington, visiting professor at Beijing University of Technology and visiting lecturer at the University of Kansas. He chaired the Division of Social Science and Business at the University of Maine at Farmington, served for nearly a decade on the Maine Historical Records Advisory Board and was a grant reviewer for the National Historic Records Preservation Commission. A historian of the Cultural Cold War, O’Brien is the author of several articles and book chapters on the subject.
[00:01:38] Eric Miller: And now onto our interview. Hi Chris. Thank you for joining us today.
[00:01:44] Chris O’Brien: Very happy to be here.
[00:01:46] Eric Miller: For those unfamiliar with Maine’s Cold War geography, could you explain how Maine became a cornerstone of nuclear deterrence and why Margaret Chase Smith was central to maintaining that role?
[00:02:00] Chris O’Brien: It’s a fascinating question. In part the answer is relatively simple in terms of geography from Northern Maine to Moscow over the North Pole, is the shortest place in the United States to get there, and that is the shortest way to get to the Soviet Union at the time. So it was a product, very much of convenience. It helped that Maine had been a jumping off point to Europe during World War II, so there was some infrastructure already in place and the relative immediacy of the Cold War After that meant that taking advantage of the existing infrastructure made Maine a likely place to go.
[00:02:42] Chris O’Brien: The other advantage that Maine had is that it was rural. The sites for nuclear storage, nuclear weapons, and for bombers and other devices, being away from major population areas, was part of the goal of the Truman and Eisenhower administration when they were building up.
[00:03:02] Chris O’Brien: Margaret Chase Smith had a, an interesting role in terms of development here in Maine. She was a staunch supporter of the war effort of World War II and in particular of helping to direct federal dollars into ship building and base building and other things right here at home. And that did not change after the war ended. That very much, that congressional push for, bring dollars to my district. She was very much a part of that.
[00:03:32] Chris O’Brien: She was also a staunch anti-communist, a firm believer in the Cold War. And she was very happy to be involved in keeping Maine at least a significant player in nuclear deterrence and occasionally she was in favor of, perhaps more than deterrence.
[00:03:49] Chris O’Brien: That’s how we got to where we got is we were already built for it. We had interested congressional members who could help push that, certainly on the Naval Affairs Committee while in the house, and then later on, the Senate Armed Forces Committee. She was a staunch advocate of the military. She had rank herself, served in the reserves.
[00:04:09] Eric Miller: As any good representative would do, is to make sure that their district is getting the resources that is available at the time. And so as a Cold War historian yourself, and you mentioned the rural element, that there’s already some infrastructure for these military nuclear wares to be stored there.
[00:04:30] Eric Miller: Do you see any sort of contrast between the rural, peacefulness and nature, and in, in northern Maine we have agriculture largely and known for potato harvesting and all of that. And then right next door is the most advanced weapon ever developed at the time being stored there. Do you see any contrast there as a story in yourself?
[00:04:53] Chris O’Brien: Less than you might think. The sites that the United States chose were often places that shared a couple of advantages. They were relatively remote and therefore inexpensive places to build. They were often more remote from population centers. So the population limestone places in northern Maine up in the county boomed because of the development of military facilities, the potatoes and the lumber weren’t gonna build the size of communities that that a single bomber hanger can provide for.
[00:05:25] Chris O’Brien: So yeah, before I arrived at the Margaret Chase Smith Center, I at the library here I was in North Dakota for a couple of years. Which is dotted with similar facilities for very much the same reason. It’s relatively close over the North Pole and there aren’t a whole lot of people there. Those were major factors in that decision making. The places that the, just think of the dawn of the atomic age in the United States.
[00:05:52] Chris O’Brien: The bomb building that took place in New Mexico where I’ve spent quite a bit of time, that was chosen because it was remote. It was chosen because it was difficult to get to and that mindset continued, much of the development of the bomb took place in facilities in Chicago or in Ames, Iowa, or in Los Angeles, or in the San Diego and San Francisco and of the state.
[00:06:15] Chris O’Brien: But the actual assembly, the actual, much of the work that took place at Los Alamos, took place only at Los Alamos. They had to build that whole thing from nothing. So that notion of go somewhere remote had a secondary benefit or was supposed to, which is, it’s easier to police who comes in and out. So it limits the chances of subversion or spying, as we know, that didn’t work all that well.
[00:06:39] Chris O’Brien: But there, there aren’t many stories of that happening here in Maine that I’m aware of, at least it could have but I’m not aware of that as much as it happened earlier. But the security grew much more intense later.
[00:06:51] Eric Miller: That’s funny. I that makes me think of like how much the environmental ethic and conversation has changed so much.
[00:06:58] Eric Miller: Obviously since the 1950s, I mean, when Loring Air Force Base opened, it would be nearly 20 years before the EPA is established. And so that is, it’s a very different time. And like you said, it’s from a price and security sensitivity perspective, those locations do make a lot of sense. And then that economic investment that comes with these spaces as well is attractive for a representative for sure.
[00:07:23] Chris O’Brien: One really good example that actually comes from Washington state, the Hanford facility that produced plutonium, used the Columbia River as a coolant.
[00:07:31] Eric Miller: Those little things are so fascinating to me. I love environmental history and interaction with resources and stories like that where it’s, oh, we have, we’re trying to do this thing here and there’s the resource right there, and so we’re, yeah.
[00:07:44] Eric Miller: And layer all sorts of other contributing factors on top of it too. Many of these factors also being political and social, which leads us into, I don’t know if you’d characterize it as attention, but Senator Smith being famous for the Declaration of Conscience against McCarthyism, and while she advocated for nuclear weapons use against the Soviet Union, how does she reconcile the fight for civil liberties with her stance as a cold warrior?
[00:08:14] Chris O’Brien: That is a fascinating question and a really difficult one in part because you have to roll yourself back to the time. So she’s a northern Republican. She is a reliable vote for civil rights. She’s a reliable vote for many things that southern Democrats were opposed to. However in terms of standing firm against communism.
[00:08:34] Chris O’Brien: If Joe McCarthy wasn’t making wild accusations, she wouldn’t have made the speech. That’s pretty much it. Is that she did not disagree with the fundamental premise. She disagreed with the smearing of people and the offering of no evidence and the attempts to investigate that, that indicate that McCarthy really has nothing.
[00:08:54] Chris O’Brien: The best of the Senate investigations reveal that, that he’s got a State Department document that’s created during World War II that names some people who have been removed because of past affiliations. And by past, I mean often Great Depression era. I was a college student who flirted with communism sort of thing, right? I was a folk singer and fellow traveler in my youth where they had long since left it behind. There’s not much to find for Joe McCarthy. The big work has been done.
[00:09:27] Chris O’Brien: So the other half of that Declaration of Conscience speech is actually a denunciation of the Truman administration for not standing firmly enough for giving an opening to communists in the United States and around the world.
[00:09:41] Chris O’Brien: That it is a speech that has, you can think of it as two different halves. One is a castigation of a man who she never names for basically being rude, for just being absolutely uncivil. Let’s go with that. The other half of that speech is an acknowledgement that the world is a difficult and dangerous place.
[00:10:05] Chris O’Brien: So I happen to know this is true because in 1953, she introduced legislation to ban the Communist Party of the United States. It died in committee. The Eisenhower administration wasn’t interested in pushing this right at the point. Joe Stalin was either soon to be or already dead. And the chaos that surrounded the death of Stalin might have presented opportunities to forge a new path.
[00:10:28] Chris O’Brien: Turned out it didn’t. But scholars have argued about whether that the United States might have played a bit more active role, rather than wait and see who would emerge. The bill itself died, but she was able to attach a writer to an appropriations amendment that effectively helped ban the Communist Party of the United States.
[00:10:47] Chris O’Brien: So the notion that she is a firm civil libertarian is true to an extent, but her anti-communism is probably more important in the context of communism, then it is civil liberties writ large. She voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act. She voted in favor of the Voting Rights Act. She voted in favor of Medicare and Medicaid. She voted in favor of a whole lot of things, but if there was a Communist involved, she was pretty much: vote no. If there was a weapon system involved, other than a few examples, she pretty much was gonna vote yes.
[00:11:18] Chris O’Brien: The ones that are probably the greatest evidence for this is late in her career in the 1960s as the United States is mired in the Vietnam War, and there’s an opportunity to start reconsidering the relationship with the Soviet Union, which is funding in part the Vietnamese, but also struggling with China at the same time. A handful of treaties, international treaties came across, she saw while she was in the Senate, she saw a half dozen of these treaties, some of which seems so obvious now, but we’ve largely given up on them.
[00:11:51] Chris O’Brien: So the Seabed Treaty, nobody can arm the seabed. The Antarctic Treaty. Nobody can put nuclear weapons on the Antarctic, the Space Treaty that does the same. She was hesitant about all of those when more substantial ones came along, Test Ban Treaty to prevent the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. She opposed. She absolutely thought it was a terrible idea that this would give an advantage to the Soviets.
[00:12:21] Chris O’Brien: Jack County expressed disappointment because they worked her hard and she still voted no. When the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty came through, she voted no. She was absolutely opposed. She thought this was giving an advantage to Russia, so it’s a complicated relationship. And in some ways it’s just two different worlds.
[00:12:46] Chris O’Brien: One is the world of what we think of as civil liberties here at home, if we exclude communists. And the other is how she thought of the world in international terms and of the dangers facing the United States in particular. There’s a divide there, but she really had no tolerance for the idea. She thought communists were dangerous subversives who were trying to overthrow the United States government and said so often.
[00:13:14] Chris O’Brien: What I often see is what people often ask about conflates part of the Declaration of Conscience speech with a later sensibility about what civil liberties means. They were not opposed to each other at the time. Yeah. What was seen as a civil libertarian and a fierce anti-communist at the same moment. And she was both.
[00:13:34] Eric Miller: So much of that is fascinating, especially from the vantage point of now 2026.
[00:13:39] Eric Miller: And I would love to investigate a couple of the things that you said a little bit further. And so on both sides of that, that divide that you had mentioned. Of course trying to ban a communist party in the United States. As that could, at the time, would be seen as sympathetic and likely supported by the Soviet Union.
[00:14:00] Eric Miller: And is there any distinction-and there had been fears of mass anarchy and anarchists and socialism was an idea before this period. Was there a distinction between those like various largely considered subversive types of groups that she had differentiated from a Communist party or communist type of idea?
[00:14:25] Chris O’Brien: I am trying to think if she had put it in that way that I’m aware of. So the House Committee on American Activities is originally created to go after pro-Nazi forces. It morphs into anybody we don’t like. And I really mean anybody we don’t like at that moment, who’s ever in charge? Its focus on communism is probably its greatest enduring legacy.
[00:14:53] Chris O’Brien: She’s not there, she never serves on that committee. She is on the Senate Internal Subcommittee on Investigations, Internal Investigations Subcommittee, Joe McCarthy’s committee. He pushes her out. Yeah. So the purpose of that committee morphed when McCarthy took over. It was one of the consequences of the speech was that she basically entered the political wilderness for a while.
[00:15:21] Chris O’Brien: She had a hard time finding committee appointments. She had a hard time having any real sway. Who did she think the threat was? She’s pretty consistent that it’s the threat of communism, but in the world of anti-communism, she’s a moderate anti-communist. She’s not a kill ’em all anti-communist. There were plenty of those people.
[00:15:44] Chris O’Brien: She’s much more of a, we need not to, out in the world. We need not to talk so much about the greatness of America. We need to bring the greatness of America to people. We need to improve there a lot. And then the attraction of China or the Soviet Union will not be as great. They will understand the benefits of, let’s call it democratic capitalism at the time.
[00:16:08] Chris O’Brien: She does not speak up about a re-emergent KKK in the 1950s and 60s. It, they aren’t re-emergent in Maine at that moment. And so it’s not an issue for her. She perpetually says that she is not a feminist. So some of the things that we’d think of later as prime ground for civil liberties work where some folks say this is the way to go, and other folks say those are the enemies, she’s often silent. And sometimes troublingly silent when asked directly.
[00:16:43] Chris O’Brien: That said the importance of that speech, somebody standing up to Joe McCarthy, I don’t wanna underplay that. I don’t want that to seem like it is not a truly significant in almost every collection of the greatest political speeches, you’ll find that one.
[00:16:59] Chris O’Brien: At least part of it. At least part of it.
[00:17:03] Eric Miller: What a, just a fascinating, layered character. And I think what I’m really getting from what you’re saying right there is what it means for a politician in that moment to navigate the different challenges that they’re presented with, trying to maintain support from their constituency and also forge ahead with their agenda and create coalition and advance the legislation that they want to. And it, it’s a really interesting experience that, that she had there at that time.
[00:17:36] Chris O’Brien: Right. So the, I couldn’t agree more. The thing that she was famous for was bipartisan work. Let’s be clear, she’s a reliable vote for Republican policies. She said, almost always, she wasn’t willing to tell people how she was gonna vote, and she did occasionally vote no to Republican policies, but she did work across the aisle. She did look for consensus. She did look for ways where folks with common interests could push together legislation.
[00:18:05] Chris O’Brien: I was just going back and reviewing some congressional votes before you and I talked to see what the difference is. How does the world of 60 or 70 years ago compare and the party structures have changed? The party loyalties have changed in that time, so it wasn’t surprising. Except it was, how stark the difference is that there was a great deal more consensus across the aisle in the time that she served than there has been, at least since the 1980s. So I think that, that is the important element as well.
[00:18:42] Chris O’Brien: She can often appear heroic, and often was, but she also was a beneficiary of the idea that you can find somebody to talk to and agree with and you might not agree about anything else. And we do still see that in Congress today. We still see that in state legislatures today, but it is a difficult thing to find.
[00:19:02] Chris O’Brien: It was somewhat less so when she served, not entirely less but somewhat.
[00:19:08] Eric Miller: Yeah. Politics is a strange game. Another thing that, you mentioned that, I wanna tie up a little thread that I opened up before, it seemed to Senator Smith at least, that if it wasn’t related to democratic capitalism or communism, fringe ideas weren’t worth addressing. Likely. It’s what, what matters right now is going to be the communist discussion and we’ll deal with that. There’s a lot of other things to, to deal with. And then to move on to the other part of what you were saying about some of the voting she did and the cold warrior action she was part of a couple things stood out to me.
[00:19:49] Eric Miller: She voted no to ban intercontinental missiles. And so that’s part of setting up the nuclear triad. And also what’s interesting is the, if I’ve heard you correctly, the banning of seabed related, putting military types of weaponry on the seabed. But there was also, and I don’t know off the top of my head when exactly the submarine part of the nuclear triad was established exactly. There’s, nuclear powered submarines were invented early in the Cold War. I don’t know exactly off the top of my head, maybe you do, when nuclear submarines with missiles, nuclear missiles on board, were lurking in the depths. But that differentiation of, okay, so there, you can’t arm the seabed, but we have the submarines underwater around the world.
[00:20:50] Chris O’Brien: So if you want complicated, you have just wandered into complicated.
[00:20:55] Eric Miller: I love it. I love it. This is, that’s the whole goal of the podcast is to just really peel into these layers.
[00:21:02] Chris O’Brien: So immediately following World War II, there’s this fundamental fight between the branches of the service as to who gets to have nukes.
[00:21:10] Chris O’Brien: So it was the United States Navy that delivered the nukes to Japan. It was Army Air Force that dropped them. The Navy wants its own nukes. They don’t want the Marines to have them, but they would like them all shipboard. So there’s a series of tests in 1949 of naval tests in the South Pacific and there’s some fascinating stuff that’s been written about it.
[00:21:35] Chris O’Brien: I won’t wade into it too far because she didn’t really have anything to say other than: Yay, let’s test some nukes. The, one of my favorites was there was a concern worldwide that testing an underwater nuke would blow a hole in the bottom of the ocean and allow all the water to drain out. So they actually had to put out propaganda films explaining how oceans work and what’s in the middle. It’s not just a big hole down there. And yeah, but that was the Navy making the case that they needed nuclear weapons. And so the jump from shipboard to submarines is relatively quick. The problem there is delivery. Is how do you get them to move? And so the work on rocket technology that takes place immediately following the warmings by the early 1950s got relatively reliable short-range rockets.
[00:22:22] Chris O’Brien: The longer range stuff develops through the 1950s into the 1960s. And so who they belong to, who gets to use them, and how, is a fundamental debate. Military historians are just wandering around this now and who’s allied with who, at which moment and who’s got who’s ear and in Congress, the difference between a seabed and a submarine was debated.
[00:22:48] Chris O’Brien: And so the Seabed Treaty is one of those wildly popular things. Signatories, everybody who’s got a seacoast says, yeah, let’s sign that. But yeah, it’s one of those things that came up as, can we have the treaty and does that mean we just don’t ever quite land on the bottom of the sea? It’s not an installation. Does that count? So yeah, some really interesting stuff that happened there.
[00:23:10] Chris O’Brien: My favorite, and it’s from my own research from years ago, the Soviets actually reached the moon before the United States does. They launch a rocket and land, basically a radio transponder. And so I was at the Eisenhower Library and kids are writing into Eisenhower to ask him if Russia now owns the moon, like the Spanish planting a flag, right?
[00:23:33] Chris O’Brien: So and so part of the answer to not, not arming space, is things like that. How do we deal with questions like this? What counts as the seabed? Some really fascinating things on that side of the debates about what counts for, how do we maintain safety here at home? How do we keep the world safe? I will loop back to one of the things that you said, that part of the explanation is Senator Smith and most Americans saw the world in very binary terms.
[00:24:05] Chris O’Brien: There are two powers. They might have allies, but there are two. And so if you see the world that way, it grows simpler in some ways. The end of Cold War is the realization that there aren’t just two, right? That China has the longest armed border in the world, but she’s outta office before that realization is strong enough to really begin making a difference.
[00:24:29] Eric Miller: Yeah it’s again, being in 2026 and knowing what happens and the polarity of power and how it’s divided has changed in more, okay. Just to break the fourth wall. I’m younger than you, Chris. I was born just after the Wall fell, and so I lived through a unipolar to multipolar world.
[00:24:53] Eric Miller: And you lived in the dual polar world, bipolar world, and it is amazing how much it shifts and how much we’re constantly learning and looking at China’s border right now, I believe there’s 14 countries. And it is incredibly varied in terms of who those countries are, the power that they have, and the goals of them, as well as the goals of China.
[00:25:19] Eric Miller: And that is a whole other podcast series, let alone a brief little discussion that we can have. And, I if it hasn’t come across to the listener quite yet, I’ve learned a lot in this episode including how much the submarine navigator, how careful they needed to be, not just to not run aground for the sake of the lives and property of the military at the time, but they might violate a treaty.
[00:25:44] Eric Miller: I did not know that because they might have just accidentally armed a seabed.
[00:25:47] Chris O’Brien: Nobody was ever brought up on that. There was never a complaint of that. Either they were very safe or nobody wanted to say anything. So…
[00:25:55] Eric Miller: I bet both are true. I bet both are true. So as I’ve learned a lot in the discussion we’ve had today, what educational tools or sources does the Margaret Chase Smith Library currently offer to help the public connect with Senator Smith’s legislative work with her involvement in nuclear deterrence, and what other education services does the library offer about Margaret Chase Smith’s legacy?
[00:26:19] Chris O’Brien: So we like to think of ourselves as having multiple audiences. So one is researchers. We will have researchers coming in, working on books or recently on plays, often on poetry, who are here to examine a specific issue and they wanna wade around in her own writings, her own speeches.
[00:26:37] Chris O’Brien: We have all of her speeches abound together and are in the process of beginning to digitize those to make them more widely available. We have her teleprompter cards from throughout her life when she was using a teleprompter, and one of the things that we like to point out is as she aged and her eyesight grew worse, the font gets bigger, and just so the listeners know that I am older than you, I now have a bigger font. So all sorts of sympathy there. We also offer field trips to, to schools, we get an awful lot of third and fourth graders who come through, that is a very different program than it is for researchers.
[00:27:14] Chris O’Brien: And what we do is try and connect her to Maine and to her record and to, to what’s happening here in the state and around the world and how she had an influence on that. So one of the things that, that the kids like, she in 1957 broke the sound barrier. So she went up in a jet, and we have the flight suit.
[00:27:35] Chris O’Brien: It’s no longer out for viewership because it was out for 25 years. And sunlight’s hard on things on fabric in particular. So we’ve had to tuck it away into a dark storage box in the, in our storage. But we have the pictures of her climbing up into the plane. And so the flight suit was orange. She asked for blue.
[00:27:57] Chris O’Brien: That was her color. She wanted blue, and they said no. And she said, okay, I’m wearing my own shoes, high heels, not compression boots. And so she had long, thin feet, and so the compression boots probably wouldn’t have worked, and that’s how they explained it later. But I like to think that she just wanted to wear her high heels when she broke the sound barrier.
[00:28:21] Chris O’Brien: And it turns out to be a story that kids love. So the, and then we have college students who come as well and we will gladly run how to do research. She was involved. It’s a 32 year political career. Pretty much anything that happened between 1940 and 1972 and arguably beyond in both ends, we probably have something that’s related to it.
[00:28:46] Chris O’Brien: We had a worker, or we had a student here last summer working on her role with pushing forward NASA, with pushing forward the space program that sees a man land on the moon, right? The, she was, that was a defense initiative. But the race to the moon was something that she very much got behind.
[00:29:05] Chris O’Brien: She was interested in tidal power, she was interested in potato farming. She was interested in the lumber industry. She’s interested in everything that you might imagine in Maine and was not afraid to give a speech about it. So fame for being relatively quiet in Washington. Not one to go take the floor unless she really had something to say, but she was a, she ran her campaigns by going out and talking to people.
[00:29:34] Chris O’Brien: She did not fundraise. In fact, she sent campaign contributions back to people. Yep. So if you would like to know how the world has changed, and one of the things that arguably changed within her lifetime is the rise of television and the enormous cost of running a campaign.
[00:29:50] Chris O’Brien: She was very much in favor of adopting a movie rating system. A congressionally approved movie rating system. So there’s information here about that. So back to the civil liberties notion. She had some ideas about what movies ought to be showing, and so Hollywood stepped in and created their own. That’s the one that was only modified from the time that it was created. It’s slightly different now, but not greatly, rather than having congressional oversight over the content of movies. So there is much, much here. There are about 350,000 documents, personal correspondence-type documents, all of her speeches, all of the, we have much of the work that she did while she was in Congress and in both Houses.
[00:30:38] Chris O’Brien: Not all of it, because some of it remains classified and given what we’ve been talking about that shouldn’t be surprising. But the library itself is filled with things for people to come and explore and research.
[00:30:53] Chris O’Brien: Also as we speak, setting up some new exhibits. We’ve got a new way of doing exhibits. We’ll have some stuff happening over the course of the coming months that we would love to have people come and see. And this summer we’ll have four events with partner organizations for kids. Including working with the University of Maine Extension Service to have a touch tank, so sea creatures out in our parking lot, working with the local library, with the Skowhegan free public library to give kids an opportunity to come do that.
[00:31:27] Chris O’Brien: Many things. They’re posted on our website. We encourage people to follow along. We try to keep that up to date. We are on winter hours right now, so if anybody would like to come visit, give us a buzz and we’ll be happy to set up an appointment. We’ll move back to summer hours as we get closer to summer, and then we’ll be open five days a week, 10 to 3 basically for the Senator’s House is part of the museum. And we do tours of her house. So if you wanna see how she lives, how she lived much of her life, it is as it was when she passed away in 1995. Pretty much. We’ve got a couple of things that we have to tell people, like we use her kitchen, so we’re not entirely sure that all the silverware was hers but we host events here and so we had to have something.
[00:32:13] Chris O’Brien: But we do encourage folks to do that. We do tours Monday through Thursday at 1 o’clock in the summer, and we’re happy to do it by appointment at other times. So much to see and do here and more all the time.
[00:32:25] Eric Miller: Wonderful. We will have a link to the website in the description of this episode. And if you’re ever in Skowhegan, try to incorporate into your trip. You’ll learn a lot. And you’ll get to, if you have questions like I had developed throughout the course of this episode, you can meet Chris yourself and the staff, and chat some more.
[00:32:47] Chris O’Brien: If you want real answers, you should meet the staff. They know more than I do. That’s why we have ’em. Th at’s, they’re very good.
[00:32:55] Eric Miller: That’s amazing. The power of the collective can’t be matched. Thank you Chris for coming on the podcast and providing us with so much information about Senator Margaret Chase Smith and about the Cold War in general and really appreciate your time.
[00:33:11] Chris O’Brien: Thank you, Eric. This was great.
[00:33:14] Eric Miller: If you enjoyed this episode and the previous discussions we’ve had on this podcast, please consider donating to the Maine Policy Review by visiting the journal’s website linked in the description. Our team includes Barbara Harrity and Joyce Rumery, co-editors of Maine Policy Review, and Jonathan Rubin, director of the Policy Center.
[00:33:32] Eric Miller: Special thanks to professional writing consultant Kathryn Swacha, technical writer Nicole LeBlanc, and podcast producer, editor, and writer Jayson Heim. Our podcast music is composed by Nathanael Batson. Visit mcslibrary.org to learn about Margaret Chase Smith, the library, and our work in public policy and education.
[00:33:53] Eric Miller: Find episode materials, the full transcript and resources in the description of this episode, and on the Maine Policy Matters website. Share your topic ideas via the form on our website and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can find all of our episodes wherever you find your podcast. And thank you for listening.